Cultural Purity and the Refute of the Inevitable Momentum :: essays papers

Cultural Purity and the Refute of the Inevitable Momentum In the introduction to â€Å"The Pure Products Go Crazy,† James Clifford offers a poem by William Carlos Williams about a housekeeper of his named Elsie. This girl is of mixed blood, with a divided common ancestry, and no real collective roots to trace. Williams begins to make the observation that this is the direction that the world is moving in, as Clifford puts it—â€Å"an inevitable momentum.† Clifford believes in that, â€Å"in an interconnected world, one is always to varying degrees, ‘inauthentic.’† In making this statement, Clifford is perhaps only partially accurate. In the western hemisphere, where Williams was located, perhaps it can be said directly that the influence of modern society has attributed to the lack of general ancestry, as one culture after another has blended with the next. Perhaps it can be said as well that, as Clifford puts it, â€Å"there seem no distant places left on the planet where the presence of Ã¢â‚¬Ë œmodern’ products, media, and power cannot be felt† (Clifford, 14). The intention of this paper is to contend first that there is essentially such a thing as â€Å"pure† culture, and contrary to Clifford’s belief, that there are â€Å"pure† unblended cultures that remain (while not altogether untouched by foreign influence), natural within themselves. It will be argued as well that the influence of modern society does not necessarily lead to a loss of cultural soundness itself, but rather that a presence of certain cultural practices within the respective cultures has attributed to the lasting â€Å"purity† of certain cultures. In this case, we will be discussing the cultures that exist in Haiti and Bali. To address the first part of my argument, we fist must take in hand what exactly is this â€Å"pure† culture that has been mentioned thus far. Clifford believes that cultures, for the sake of the argument being made can be said to be impure cultures, â€Å"have had to reckon with the forces of ‘progress’ and ‘national’ unification,† and that essentially this has led to â€Å"many traditions, languages, cosmologies, and values [being] lost, some literally murdered† (Clifford, 16). He argues that inevitably, all cultures either will, or have experienced this, and in the end have transformed into an alternate version of themselves. I propose that a â€Å"pure† culture is one that has either not had to deal with such circumstances, or has dealt with outside influences, without altering what is wholly exclusive about itself.